Manageability is a key requirement for a broad spectrum of information technology (IT) systems ranging from laptops to blade servers to clusters to large scale data centers. With rising complexity and scale in tomorrow's enterprise IT, systems management has become a dominating cost. As referred herein, manageability includes management and maintenance tasks or operations. As also referred herein, and as understood in the art, information technology, or IT, encompasses all forms of technology, including but not limited to the design, development, installation, and implementation of hardware and software information or computing systems and software applications, used to create, store, exchange and utilize information in its various forms including but not limited to business data, conversations, still images, motion pictures and multimedia presentations technology and with the design, development, installation, and implementation of information systems and applications. Thus, examples of IT management and maintenance tasks or operations include diagnostics and recovery, security protection, backups, resource provisioning, and asset management of IT systems.
At a broader level, the scope of IT manageability may be associated with the lifecycle phases for servers and data centers, including bring up, operation, failures/changes, and retire/shutdown phases. Various tasks are performed at each of these life cycle stages. Examples include systems, security protection against viruses and spyware, backup protection against disasters, disk maintenance to improve performance, fault diagnostics and recovery, and asset management to track resources. Currently, there are several efforts underway to address this growing problem of manageability. For example, software based solutions have been proposed to address manageability at the different lifecycle phases. In such solutions, several of the manageability tasks execute during the operation phase of the servers, sharing hardware and software resources with host applications. This sharing leads to resource interference and hence degradation in performance. Such degradation is expected to worsen with growing IT complexity and corresponding increases in the growing number and sophistication of manageability tasks.
One approach to address the above concerns is to provide better platform support for manageability tasks. An emerging trend towards this direction is the use of manageability processors (MPs)—dedicated hardware processors that only execute manageability tasks and provide an out-of-band channel for remote management. A typical MP is a small embedded application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) customized for specific manageability uses or operations. It can be hooked off, for example, the peripheral component interconnect (PCI) bus at an input/output (I/O) bus (e.g., the southbridge) of computerized systems such as servers and personal computers (PCs). Instantiations of such MP architectures or platforms follow an asymmetrical model. The host system includes a powerful processor or central processing unit (CPU), large memory, network interface cards or modules (NIC), a server operating system (OS), while the manageability system includes a cheaper embedded processor, a small dedicated memory, NIC, and a private embedded OS that executes independently of the host system. Such asymmetry and independence aids in removing resource interference for processors, buses, caches, and memory, thereby resulting in improved performance for host workloads that are CPU and memory bound.